The Sadness of T-Pain

Rappers are supposed to be immune to hate. Even Drake, who is famously unafraid to appear sensitive and vulnerable in his songs, never wavers on this: haters are losers who do not deserve his attention. “Got one reply for all of your comments: fuck what you think,” as he put it on last year’s “Tuscan Leather.”

T-Pain was never very good at being a rapper. He tried to be, when he was just starting out. But, as he told me in a recent interview, he ultimately decided to break into hip-hop as a singer instead. The move worked: T-Pain’s first album, the aptly named “Rappa Ternt Sanga,” released in 2005, made the chubby twenty-year-old from Tallahassee a star. Before long, he was generating one hit single after another, both on his own and as a featured guest alongside heavyweights like Kanye West, R. Kelly, and E-40. Even at the height of his celebrity, he never acted tough or particularly cool; his trademark accessories were a giant top hat and Oakley sunglasses that made him look like a snowboarder. Lately, T-Pain has been doing something even more unorthodox in hip-hop: telling sad stories, in public, about what it felt like when everyone, including some of his fellow-artists, started treating him like a joke.

The songs that made T-Pain a household name in the mid-aughts were mostly about having fun at night clubs and hanging out with pretty girls, but the most important thing they shared was a signature studio effect called Auto-Tune. Traditionally seen as nothing more than a pitch-correcting technology used in secret to patch up flawed vocal takes, Auto-Tune became something else in T-Pain’s hands, turning the human voice into a new and bewitching instrument, and giving his in particular a vaguely alien and a computerized quality that sounded at once triumphant and melancholy.

Though most pop-music fans still remember T-Pain’s big hits, most notably the slinky and infectious “Buy U a Drank,” by his fourth album, “Revolver,” in 2011, he had come to be seen as an uncool novelty act—a goofy-looking dork who rode to fame with a production gimmick that not only sounded corny but concealed his true lack of singing ability. In 2009, Jay Z released a hit single called “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” intended to draw a line between so-called “real” hip-hop and poppy soft stuff; it inspired fans to chant “Fuck T-Pain!” during live performances. That same year, Christina Aguilera, of all people, was photographed wearing a T-shirt that said “AUTO TUNE IS FOR PUSSIES.” The comedy rap group The Lonely Island featured T-Pain on their song “I’m on a Boat,” performing more or less as a parody of himself. The song was nominated for a Grammy; when asked about the honor on the red carpet, T-Pain admitted it was kind of weird that his music didn’t get nominated, but a “mockery of the art” did.

The apparent collapse of his career sent T-Pain, now twenty-eight years old, into a depression that left him unmotivated to make any more music. Only recently has he emerged from this dark period: he has started work on a comeback album, landed the tense and pretty single “Up Down (Do This All Day)” on the charts, and today embarks on a tour called “I Am T-Pain.” To promote all that activity, T-Pain has also been giving interviews, in which he has candidly discussed the experience of turning from one of pop’s hit-makers into a walking punch line.

What started the backlash, as T-Pain sees it, wasn’t the Jay Z diss but, rather, so many relentlessly lame performers (Ke$ha, the Black Eyed Peas) being moved to give Auto-Tune a whirl after “Rappa Ternt Sanga” came out. Soon, everyone was using Auto-Tune; listeners simply got sick of it, and he became a martyr for having influenced the trend.

There’s an argument to be made that T-Pain should have just stopped using Auto-Tune and figured out some other way to stand out—that, sometimes, it’s worth listening to the haters. But what has made T-Pain most resentful since his fall from the top was seeing certain artists use Auto-Tune and not get criticized; rather, they were celebrated as innovators in a way that T-Pain never was. Chief among these were Kanye West, who employed Auto-Tune to great acclaim on his 2008 album, “808s and Heartbreaks,” and, more recently, the Atlanta-based rapper/singer Future, whose use of Auto-Tune has won him the adoration of critics as well as incredible success on the charts.

In an interview this past January with Vladimir Lyubovny, a d.j. whose popular YouTube channel VladTV is sort of like rap’s “Larry King Live,” T-Pain talked about being brought in as a consultant during the recording of “808s and Heartbreaks.” At one point during the session, Kanye wrote a song about how dumb all of T-Pain’s ideas were. He then proceeded, T-Pain said, to make “everybody in the studio join in with him to sing, like, ‘T-Pain’s shit is weak.’ ” In the same interview, T-Pain recalled encountering Future’s brother at a Thanksgiving fundraiser and telling him he was eager to collaborate with Future. But instead of offering to pass on the message, the guy looked at T-Pain and said to him, “My brother would never fucking work with you. Fuck you and everything you stand for.”

Hearing T-Pain recount these slights, one may suspect that he is trotting them out strategically, in service of getting press and laying the groundwork for the release of his next album. But so what if he is? Anyone who has ever felt the sting of ridicule should be able to relate to his experiences, especially given how, contrary to what one might expect from a prosperous grown man with a stack of No. 1 records to his name, T-Pain really took all the negativity to heart. As he told the radio personality Sway, the criticism and mockery convinced him that he actually was worthless as an artist. “I just wasn’t proud of myself anymore.”

Before I call T-Pain to interview him on a recent Friday evening, his publicist warns me not to expect bitterness but optimism—a T-Pain who no longer cares what anyone thinks, and is ready to return to center stage on his own terms. In light of the circumstances, I’m not surprised to hear that work on his new album, titled “Stoicville: The Phoenix,” has been a deliberately low-key process. “It’s usually just me and my engineer,” T-Pain says. “I try not to crowd out the studio with too many different opinions. You don’t want everybody trying to put their two cents into a song that’s supposed to be coming from your heart.”

This, it turns out, has become T-Pain’s great bugbear—that everyone is always giving him an opinion about what he’s doing. It was this feeling of constantly being judged, he says, that led to the crisis of confidence he suffered in the wake of “Revolver,” an album that was supposed to demonstrate his will to “evolve,” as the pun in the title suggested, but instead turned out to be his worst-selling effort to date, and solidified his past-due status. “I wasn’t getting the credit I felt like I deserved,” he tells me. “I was getting shitted on. So I was just like, well, I’m not gonna keep doing this if that’s all I’m gonna get.”

He sounds infectiously, incongruously chipper as he says this, cheerfully laughing at the straightforward cause-and-effect relationship between the album’s reception and his reaction to it. “People can act like, you know, ‘I don’t care about when people hate on me,’ but the second that they do, you feel that!” T-Pain says. “Like, that’s really somebody saying that shit about you—it’s not, like, an artificially generated comment that these people are leaving on these YouTube videos.… When people say I suck and I should kill myself, I don’t really feel good about that!”

People always tell him it makes no sense for someone in his position to care so much about idiot teen-agers posting comments on social media. “People are, like, ‘You’re rich!’ What’re you so worried about?’ ” he says. “And I’m, like, money ain’t the issue here. Yeah, I can buy shit. But I want people to like me, too! God damn!”

When he says this, once again laughing, I think instantly about the photograph on the cover of Drake’s “Take Care,” which shows the artist sitting glumly in front of a golden goblet, looking painfully aware of how little solace his riches can bring him in his darkest moments. The difference is that while Drake is comfortable making art out of his loneliness and disappointment, at the end of the day, when he goes out in public, he tends to come off as utterly untouchable. T-Pain is the opposite: as far as I know, he has never channelled any of his sadness about the way he’s been treated into his music, but he’s completely willing to talk about it when asked.

It occurs to me to wonder whether this might change—whether T-Pain’s next album, the one he’s working on right now in his secluded home studio, might reflect some of the hurt that he’s clearly still carrying. But when I ask him about it, he waves it off. “It’s gonna be about having a good time, man. And being true to yourself.” That, he explains, is why he’s calling it “Stoicville.”

I assume, at first, he means for the album to project a sense of indifference in the face of criticism. But it turns out this is dead wrong.

“Stoicville,” T-Pain continues, “is where everybody is stoic—where nobody has emotions. You don’t get shit from anybody in Stoicville. You don’t get people saying or doing fucked up shit to you. Everybody’s just stoic. Nobody has emotions and everybody minds their own fucking business. That’s the town for me. That’s where I want to live.” The way he says it, I swear he sounds like he’s in a great mood.